Mathematical Theologies

Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9309670
AutoresDavid Albertson
Año2014
Páginas512
Fecha de publicación2014-06-17
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaMathematical Theologies (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199989737.001.0001
OpenAlexW4234228910
Open LibraryOL27556606M
ISBN9780199989737
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12

This book uncovers the lost history of Christianity’s encounters with Pythagorean religious ideas before the Renaissance. The writings of Thierry of Chartres (d. 1157) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) represent a robust Christian Neopythagoreanism that reconceived the Trinity and the Incarnation within the framework of Greek number theory. Platonist theologies of the divine One and the decad had developed slowly between the Old Academy and Plotinus and were preserved in different ways in late antique Neoplatonism. By reading Boethius and Augustine in radically new ways, Thierry activated a suppressed potential in ancient Christian traditions that harmonized the divine Word with notions of divine Number. Although he was influential in his lifetime, his ideas remained outside the mainstream in subsequent centuries. When Nicholas of Cusa encountered fragments of Thierry’s works—and those of Thierry’s medieval readers—he drew on them liberally in his first major mystical treatise. Yet tensions within this dossier of Chartrian sources spurred Cusanus to find ways to reconcile their competing understandings of Word and Number. In this way over three decades, Nicholas demonstrated how to articulate Christian doctrines within a Neopythagorean cosmology, or mathematized nature. These two examples of mathematical theologies challenge contemporary assumptions about the relation of religion and modern science and about the nature of modernity itself

Ancient history · Antique · Art · Christianity · Epistemology · Gnosticism · Incarnation · Literature · Modernity · Mysticism · Neoplatonism · Relation (database · Scholasticism · Theology · Classics · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science · History · History and Theory of Mathematics · Philosophy · 1401-1464 · Influence · Mathematics · Nicholas, of cusa, cardinal · Pythagoras · Religion and science